Marcus Schmickler

Noise

Editions Mego 2019 / 2020 / 2021

Taken from the album 'Suisse Redux' released as LP and Digital

François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298)

Taken from the album 'Sky Dice / Mapping the Studio' released as LP and Digital

Marcus Schmickler 'Sky Dice / Mapping the Studio (excerpt)'  (EMEGO 296)

Taken from the album 'All Skies Sounded' released as 2LP, CD and Digital

The Transcendence Orchestra 'Satsuma Felt Slow' (EMEGO 304)

Split Series 24

Because It Speaks

Taken from the album 'Irreal' released as CD and Digital

Irreal

BJ Nilsen 'Short circuit of the conscious thought' (EMEGO 305)

Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

Bari Workshop

Axis

Para

Taken from the album 'Politiken der Frequenz' released as LP, CD and download.

Marcus Schmickler & Julian Rohrhuber  "(Surreal) Number" (eMEGO 191)

"With wings falling" is the third track from my latest release, A Shifting Lightness I.

A Shifting Lightness is a three-part series exploring the themes of Lightness and Memory.

When writing the music, I was living alone for 18 months near a small town in the North of New Zealand. Every morning I would go downstairs into my half-underground recording space, and from where I was writing I could only see through a single window above ground.

Spending so much time alone allowed me to take things slowly and to reflect on my past. It's strange what isolation can do to your thoughts, but it was rewarding to explore those aspects of myself through my music.

Hear the full release - http://hyperurl.co/qs44zk

A Shifting Lightness I

Album on Bandcamp

With wings falling

King Of The Dancehall

Fever

Independent record company based in Vienna.
For Spectrum Spools go here: https://soundcloud.com/spectrumspools